Additional techniques

Now it can get a bit cumbersome to have to make three copies of every layer…in your project whenever you want to use this instance of this effect. So there…are a couple of ways that are more efficient to go ahead and still add this to…your footage. For example, what if you have a composition where you've already…built an edit and you want to apply this look to the entire composition. Well,…a way to do that is to add Layer > New > Adjustment Layer.…Any effect applied to Adjustment Layer will be applied to the composite of…everything underneath. So I add Effect > Blur & Sharpen > Fast Blur, go ahead and…blur it out a little bit here, go ahead and repeat the edges, then set it to a mode, …such as say Overlay mode. Now we have got that rich puffed out look again.…

Before, after. And again select the layer, type T and adjust its Opacity…to decide how rich you want this effect.…Another approach is to use effects. Let's go ahead go to another example,…here's our footage again. We'll go ahead and add our blur like we did before,…

Author

Released

10/17/2008

Adding a Filmic Glow to Your Footage Using After Effects was created and produced by Trish and Chris Meyer. We are honored to host their material in the lynda.com Online Training Library®.

One of Chris Meyer's favorite tricks is a technique for adding the glowing highlights and richly saturated colors often associated with footage shot on film. This trick originated as a way to compensate for the flatness of unaltered 3D renders, but it can be used to improve any source video, whether shot on DV, HDV, or even film. The effect can be achieved in many video editing and motion graphics applications using the same basic approach: duplicate the source footage, mix it back on top of itself using blend modes, then apply a blur or similar effect to the duplicate footage. In Adding a Filmic Glow to Your Footage Using After Effects, Chris shows a variety of approaches for setting up a filmic glow in After Effects.